I'm still alive :O I spent a lot of 2017 to now slacking from TASing, so let's try and change that a little from now on. Here is a new Arcade Bionic Commando run that improves my published tas by 2331 frames. The improvement is mostly due to heavy use of a powerup the previous runs overlooked, the turbo-charge grappler, or something:)

Completes the game as fast as possible

Uses death

Manipulates luck

Info

So I already tased this game twice (well, really it's just one time, with the current movie being a mere 1 second update at the very end) and I figured that was that until the user PJ pointed out the current movie had big improvements. He also hypothesized that a movie that implemented them would be able to clock in at under 5 minutes. I made a tas that implemented his strategies, but the final time was 5:03, which although was a 30-second improvement, it wasn't below the 5-minute mark, so I deemed it to be unsubmittable, even though I wasn't even sure if it was improvable or not. So I shelved the v3 for the time being. This month, I remembered PJ's post and decided to try again. With some better luck manipulation and tactics, I was able to chop off around 8 seconds, and hit the sub-5 target. Celebration!!

Anyway, onto the new improvements. As I mentioned, there's a powerup that increases the speed of the bionic arm by quite a bit. It was overlooked in Mukki's tas as well as mine. Let's just say it saves quite a bit of time throughout the run. The other big improvement is using deaths to skip the boring elevator sequence. In Mukki's original submission comments he said he ignored death because it would cheapen the run, and I was inclined to agree. However, it feels a bit more creative to use them all in one place as a skip, and the elevator sequence was adding nothing to the run, so I figured, why not use it :)

There are also several minor route changes and optimizations. This game is quite clunky and stiff, so it's important to manipulate enemies out of your way. Luck manipulation in this game is pretty finicky, though. It can often take 10-20 frames to manipulate an enemy, and sometimes there's nothing you can do. So at times you have to grin and bear it, but luckily this doesn't happen all that often.

Other comments

Again much thanks to Mukki for kicking this game's tasvideos lifespan off and PJ for pointing out some crucial improvements to the current movie. I think this newest version is by far the most entertaining to watch and feels the most TASy, so this game is finally getting what it deserves;) Enjoy!!